Gather ’round, children and let pop tell you a story.
Back in the old days, uncle dCal and yours truly used to write all that noisy music you complain about on sequencing software by the name of Bars & Pipes on a computer known as the A1200. Writing music in those days was easy. For starters, we didn’t have these pesky jobs that get in our way these days, but more so than that, the stuff just worked. We never had any show-stoppers and could easily crank out 2-3 good songs in a week. Of course, back then we were recording tracks directly to tape so the “quality” issue had only to do with choosing a high-bias or a metal-bias cassette. Ah the days of breaking little tabs to prevent accidental erasure.
Fast forward to years later where, after having earned a respectable living for some time, uncle dCal and I now sported equipment that we could only dream of in past. Why, honk my hooter, we could now sample audio at 16-bits or better! We could record 8 tracks in parallel to disk, dump sample data back and forth directly over optical and, best of all, we could master our own songs in digital form with no loss of quality. Boy, did we walk around with our.. ahem… cocks in our hands like we ruled the planet. We were kings, we had the power, we had the technology.
And then, a funny thing happened: we started running into problems. The hardware would be glitchy or MIDI was never in sync or there’d be too much latency. Latency? Why, the term didn’t even exist back in the 90’s, did it? But here it was, our most nefarious enemy. We blamed the companies writing the software and building the hardware and we slowly but surely we found ourselves spending more time trying to solve problems or looking at alternatives than we’d spend writing music. We went from Cakewalk to Cubase to Micrologic and Logic. SCSI disks, Midex 8, Paris Pro and Windows. Slowly we started to give up. Maybe it was only meant to be fun in past.
With a few gasps of air left we slow got rid of the trouble. I found a buyer for the Paris Pro all the way in Norway. The Midex went on Ebay. The PC and Windows got kicked to the curb and replaced with a Mac and OS X. A MOTU Traveler and
a Micro Lite rounded out the hardware. All we needed now was some software to record on but we had almost tried them all. Well, the ones that were reasonably priced, at least.
I was battling between Digital Performer and a full Logic upgrade (at a price range that essentially was a deal-breaker) which really meant I was trying to choose the lesser of two evils. I read reviews of DP and just wasn’t sure about dropping that kind of money without trying it out. And then, out of the blue, a friend suggested a name I’d never heard of before: Ableton.
Things were promising from the get go because, well, looky here, I could download a demo. Uncle dCal and I built a fire, smoked a few marshmallows and started following the video tutorial as we played with it on the side. Slowly but surely we just started to see the light in Live. We started to smile at thinking about working on music rather than wincing as we had in years past. We remembered the old days with the Amiga and Bars & Pipes and the late nights and caffeine and sugar highs with breaks in the middle for naps and video games. We were traveling back.. to the future!
So here we are now, little ones. As we recover and convert all our previous music DNA, all the little ideas and phrases we put down, we now look for a little time to get our fingers all juicy. Go on, and spread the word. No, it’s not “Bang Chemistry will be back”. It’s “Bang Chemistry is back”.
That’s right.